Contact

At last there seems to be a little progress on this project. To date, I wouldn't say it's been particulaly onerous, more a question of just gluing bits of wood together to slowly build up the pattern. The biggest problem to date has been some 'tear out' on the ebony, but some judicious sanding ought to remove it.

I thought that I'd need to use some loose ply tongues to give added strength, but as the core material is 9mm ply and the total thickness is around 14mm I found out that it wasn't really neccessary, so a straight butt glued joint with TBIII sufficed. Had the box been made much larger with 6mm mdf as the core material (as in the original) then some sort of jointing would definitely have been needed, but in my smaller version, I think, hope and pray that I've got away with it...

The first pic shows the little rebate cut at each corner. This is to make the corner posts equal, but it also has the added advantage of locating the sides into the ends...

...so that when all four sides are brought together to make contact it starts to look more like a box. The next job is to clean and polish the inside of the lid and then glue it together.

On a different note, the Ashley Isles dovetail chisels have now been sold and will be replaced with something a little more Oriental. Having had one or two Ice Bear tools from Axminster in the past, they seem to be very good...time will tell.

Whist nattering about matters 'Oriental' I've made email contact with a fellow woodworker in Japan so that over the course of the next year or so a lot of my tool related and general queries about our forthcoming trip in May '12 ought to be resolved. Promising indeed...